


Ordinary Causes

by sunspeared



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, F/M, spnstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2012-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-19 21:24:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/577816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunspeared/pseuds/sunspeared
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He’s bigger than three point one pounds of vertebrate brain can conceive of, let alone hold. He’s uncountable terabytes more than the parade of shitty laptops they stick him in between bodies. He’s older than the internet, the automobile, the steam engine, and the plow--</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Sollux gets a raw deal on the bodies sometimes. (Based on anxiousAnarchist's and isozyme's <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/tags/spnstuck">SPNstuck verse</a>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ordinary Causes

**Author's Note:**

> Before you read this, you should at least take a look at "[for whom my tears have made me blind](http://archiveofourown.org/works/478104)," or know that Rose Lalonde and Dave Strider and Terezi Pyrope travel around in the Impala killing demons and looking for John, and are occasionally accompanied by the Internet in the form of Sollux. (Everyone kisses.) 
> 
> See also: isozyme [drew a thing](http://isozyme.tumblr.com/post/33061553166/an-illustration-for-this) for this fic!

It’s a stolen credit card night in the big city, which means a fancy suite in a nice hotel. Dave and Terezi run up an emperor’s room service bill and head out into the night to play whatever short con will pay their bills on the next stretch of road, and Sollux slumps over the counter in the marble-and-silver bathroom, fogging up the mirror and willing his bone ache away.

Corporeality is not his scene.

He’s bigger than three point one pounds of vertebrate brain can conceive of, let alone hold. He’s uncountable terabytes more than the parade of shitty laptops they stick him in between bodies. He’s older than the internet, the automobile, the steam engine, and the plow; when the first human beat a rod of bronze into a nail, Sollux was right there in his hindbrain, telling him his work was shit and he needed to do better. He can’t be _contained._

He’s got a big fat tumor metastasizing away in his left lung, spreading through his bone marrow, at least. In an armchair outside, Rose bangs away at the scarf she’s knitting. His heart labors in time with the clicks of her needles: 0-1, 0-1, 0-1. She’s waiting for him, so he wipes the blood-streaked sputum off his chin with a towel out of the warmer and goes out to face his imminent death.

"So you’re the ambush, huh," he says. The skin on this body is dark as a dead screen, too dark to be ashen or sallow, but the eyesight isn’t good enough to make up for the fact that he had to leave behind the memories from bodies three through five to meet its storage requirements. His vision wobbles, and the room tilts, and he swears to whatever’s listening he’s going to make the three of them pull out the eyes next time and wire in cameras instead.

"Has it gotten to the brain yet?" Rose asks, turning the scarf around and starting a new row.

"I wouldn’t know," Sollux says. "You see an EEG machine on me?"

"You must have dropped it on the way up," she says. The scarf is yellow and soft grey, perfectly innocuous. The needles aren’t. Her hair has grown out some since the last time he paid attention to it, long enough for her to need to pin it back so it won’t fall in her face. "This is the part where you tell me how long you have to live, because embodiment makes you morbid."

Terezi could get hit by a roaring tank, and it’d part around her like the Red Sea. When corporeal, Sollux is just a technopath with pretensions. He picks up the stolen laptop of the week, a much-abused Baby’s First Dell, and runs a hand over the matte purple back. "Wouldn’t want to be morbid," he says, and shuts his eyes and fishes through the internet. There’s no losing himself in the data, no separating _thought_ from _headache,_ not with the cancer—yeah, all right, it’s in his brain, being not-quite-attached to the tissues but just attached enough to feel all pain gives a spirit the distance to see shit like that. It’s never a matter of whether the body dies, anyway, but how, how fast, and at whose hands.

A passing chunk of knowledge says _nociception._ It says _initiated by the mylinated fibers_. If he can name it, he can survive it.

"Two days," Sollux says.

"Typical," Rose says.

"You wanna see my citations?" he says, and he manages one pitiful eyebrow waggle. She smiles before she can forget to scowl.

Back when they’d first got his attention, he’d looked Rose Lalonde up. Old, long-untagged Facebook pictures: Rose, the Ivy League undergrad, with the new anti-possession tattoo peeking out from underneath her handmade cardigan. Short skirt, pink headband, unchanging, smug grin. He hadn’t known what it all tallied up to until he met her clothed in flesh.

She’s the kind of paranoid fuck who doesn’t trust her electronics unless they can talk back to her. She’s nuts enough to think she’s got a shot at the Queen of Hell. He’s not Dave Strider, to follow her there and back again just because he can’t imagine doing anything else with his life.

And now comes the interrogation.

"Why didn’t you tell us right away?" she asks, taking the laptop from him and setting it down, all tender concern now. Say it’s real. Say she’s not the only paranoid fuck in the room. His body’s knee is going to give out any minute now from all the standing he’s done today: not the cancer, but an old ACL tear gone wrong when it was healing. Probably an athlete. Rose picks up on something in his posture and puts her hands on his shoulders and makes him sit down, so she can be taller than him. 

"We could have worked something out. You didn’t have to suffer."

"Terezi knew right away, didn’t she," Sollux says.

"Terezi wanted to see long it would take you to complain."

"Yeah, well." He gives in and rubs his knee. "I didn’t. And you still tattooed the body," he says, rubbing at the raw anti-exorcism mark on his back. "Don’t tell me why, I know, and I’m glad you weirdos found each other."

"What good did silence do you?" she asks.

"Why the hell do you care?"

"Because," Rose says, "I _care._ She said you enjoyed this."

She’s got those statistically improbable eyes fixed on him and only him, like they’re the only two people in the known universe. He snuck a piece of himself onto Voyager 1, way out between the stars, and he _still_ feels made tiny by her. "You’re dying to speculate," Sollux says. Every breath stings, but it’s than giving in to whatever she’s doing to his endocrine system. "It’s driving you nuts."

"Because you’re so fascinating?"

"I’m a goddamn walking miracle. Because that’s exactly the kind of cryptic demon bullshit Terezi knows will drive you batshit, and you fall for it every time," he says.

"This isn’t about me and Terezi," Rose says, with the saintly patience of a penetration tester. "This is about _you_."

"I’m a liability," he says.

"You’re an inconvenience," she says. "It’s only get worse—you understand that? The last demon in your body could have kept it alive indefinitely, but now that the artificial inertia is gone, the cancer will only metastasize faster. You’ll be robbed of movement first, then breath, and then, the seizures and memory problems—because it has reached the brain, hasn’t it? You, a being made up of every piece of data that ever was and ever will be, will _forget_. And while you play littlest cancer patient, we’re losing time."

"So kill me before Dave and TZ come back," he says. The soft butter yellows of the room—#fff9c9, some data fragments he accidentally brought along with him supply—swim in his vision.  
Rose’s fingers tap at her thighs, like a pianist warming up. "Are you testing me?" she asks.

"Would you do it?"

" _You’re_ testing _me_."

"Why not?" he asks. There goes the heartbeat, there go the sweaty palms. She’s looking at him like it’s the first time she’s ever seen him. His eyes will have gone black from the strain by now, and he left his fucking glasses in the bathroom.

"Not all of you would die," she says. "Why would I hurt you? No matter what I did to you, you’d go on."

"Damn right I would."

"Now." She tucks a lock of hair too short to warrant it behind her ear. He’s never worn a body in enough to pick up physical habits. "What happens when your bodies go?"

Rose puts a hand on his chest, healer-style. The old genealogies say the Strider and Lalonde lines never managed to churn one of those out, even before they got so tangled up in each other that the magic started doing weird shit, and the old genealogies maybe shouldn’t have been digitized. You can’t hack an oral tradition. (No. You can, but not with any tools humans ever dreamed up.) Sollux holds onto her wrist like he’s going to try and wrench her away, but she’s too strong and he’s too tired. The ache in the cores of his bones is a constant throb.

"Tell me, and I’ll make it stop," Rose says. She slides her hand up to his throat and gives it a test squeeze. This is what he wants, he tells himself. And this is what Rose Lalonde looks like rattled, or excited: nostrils flared, pupils dilated. He can’t focus on any one part of her face for too long. "Gladly."

"Not much," he says. She’s hungry for stories, and he’s not making all of it up when he goes on, "I sit there and hope the reading material I brought in—figure of speech, I don’t actually read—lasts me until TZ performs the ritual. And then, you know how I see the data? Stars, Lalonde. It’s fuckin’ galaxies in that laptop, and whenever I get back, it’s the Big Bang all over again. And, who knows, maybe I saw that, too, maybe I’m older than the universe—"

"Close your eyes," she says.

He does. He's dimly, dimly aware of a sharp point against his ear, and then he slumps to the floor. Only him and the dark now, until Terezi can put him back in the laptop, where he belongs. Cessation of input.


End file.
